Ultrasound is a non invasive, safe, low cost and practical way to look inside a patient's body. By reconstructing a 3D volume from hundreds of 2D ultrasound scans, physicians can see the internals of the body in ways otherwise impossible from scans alone. There are different ways to reconstruct the volume that differ in the reconstruction quality and speed. There are also different ways to visualize the resulting volume.

This chapter explains how ultrasound is used in medicine and presents previous work in this field. It then continues to describe different methods of reconstruction and visualization. The work done in this thesis either uses or builds upon these methods, and so they need to be understood.